Barbara Gray

BARGAINING POWER, MANAGEMENT CONTROL, AND PERFORMANCE IN UNITED STATES-CHINA JOINT VENTURES: A COMPARATIVE CASE STUDY

This article reports a comparative case study of four international joint ventures created between the United States and the People’s Republic of China. The findings of this study suggest that the relative bargaining power of potential joint-venture partners significantly contributes to the structural configuration of the joint venture with respect to parent control, and that the structure of management control exercised by the parents affects venture performance. Several informal control mechanisms interacting with formal control structure and influencing performance are identified. The article also investigates the dynamic evolution of joint ventures over time as a result of changes in the environment, adjustments in the parents’ strategies, mutual learning between the partners, and the maturity of the joint venture. Finally, an integrative model is presented and several propositions for future research are offered.

Conditions Facilitating Interorganizational Collaboration

There is a growing need to promote collaborative problem solving across various sectors of society, e.g., among business, government, labor, and communities. Organizing such collaborative efforts requires focusing on the interorganizational domain or set of interdependencies which link various stakeholders rather than on the actions of any single organization. Moreover, effective collaboration at the domain level is predicated on several preconditions. This paper synthesizes research findings from organization theory, policy analysis, and organization development, and proposes conditions that are essential to achieving collaboration during each of three successive phases of the process. Designing optimum conditions for collaboration depends on the presence and strength of these factors at appropriate points during the collaborative process.

Collaborative Alliances: Moving from Practice to Theory

The Journal of Applied Behavioral Science presents two special issues on collaborative alliances that examine the contributions and limits of existing theories for explaining collaboration, and that clarify and expand our understanding of this phenomenon. In this introduction, the following major theoretical perspectives are applied to explain collaboration and collaborative alliances: resource dependence theory; corporate social performance/institutional economics theory; strategic management/social ecology theory; macroeconomics theory; institutional/negotiated order theory; and political theory. The nine case research articles in the two special issues analyze a wide variety of collaborative alliances and provide unique insights. The articles `contributions, the levels of analysis they focus on, and the ways they address three broad issues of collaborative alliances -preconditions, process, and outcomes -are discussed. No single theoretical perspective provides an adequate foundation for a general theory of collaboration, but the articles point the way to the construction of such a theory.

Testing a Model of Organizational Response to Social and Political Issues

This study developed and tested a conceptual model explaining variability in the organizational structures firms develop to identify, analyze, and respond to their social and political environments...

Communication, Meaning, and Organized Action.

Gerald Salancik discussed this theory in a colloquium at the College of Commerce and Business Administration, University of Illinois, Champaign, in 1979. Two current perspectives on the relationship between meaning and action differ with respect to the amount of shared meaning necessary for organization. We argue that these two perspectives can be integrated if we understand how communication links meaning and action. We provide empirical evidence to show that through communication, organized action can occur despite differences of interpretation among organizational members. Communication enables members to create equifinal meaning, from which organized action can follow. Our data revealed four communication mechanisms that generate and sustain equifinal meaning: metaphor, logical argument, affect modulation, and linguistic indirection.e

Conflicting Logics, Mechanisms of Diffusion, and Multilevel Dynamics in Emerging Institutional Fields

We examine the evolution of a new population of organizations (state offices of dispute resolution) in an emerging institutional field, focusing on how actions at multiple levels interact recursively to enable multiple logics to diffuse. Logics became institutionalized as organizational practices within the field of alternative dispute resolution through four diffusion mechanisms: transformation, grafting, bridging, and exit. By describing the interplay among entrepreneurial efforts, strategic responses to resource dependencies, and mechanisms of institutionalization over 22 years, we identify the conditions that enabled multiple practices supported by conflicting logics, rather than a single, dominant organizational form, to be institutionalized.

Disentangling approaches to framing in conflict and negotiation research: A meta-paradigmatic perspective

Divergent theoretical approaches to the construct of framing have resulted in conceptual confusion in conflict research. We disentangle these approaches by analyzing their assumptions about 1) the nature of frames — that is, cognitive representations or interactional co-constructions, and 2) what is getting framed — that is, issues, identities and relationships, or interaction process. Using a meta-paradigmatic perspective, we delineate the ontological, theoretical and methodological assumptions among six approaches to framing to reduce conceptual confusion and identify research opportunities within and across these approaches.

Antecedents and Effects of Parent Control in International Joint Ventures

Using a sample of 90 US-China manufacturing joint ventures, this study empirically tested a grounded-theory model of the antecedents and the effects of the structure of parent management control in international joint ventures. The results suggest that competitive and cooperative dynamics occur simultaneously between joint venture partners. On one hand, the relative bargaining power between the partners, derived from the negotiation context and from contributing critical resources to the venture, respectively, is a determining factor in management control; and the level of operational control exercised by a partner over the venture has a positive effect on the extent to which this partner`s strategic objectives are achieved. On the other hand, the quality of the interpartner working relationship was found to have a strong, positive relationship with the achievement of strategic objectives for both partners.

Organizations as Constructions and Destructions of Meaning

Organizations are dynamic processes through which meaning is simultaneously constructed and destroyed. Organizations may be conceived of as continua along which meaning varies according to its degree of coincidence. On the one hand, organizations are stable because coincident concepts, relationships, and values are developed through socialization. These coincident meanings eventually become crystallized as informal and formal structures and are sustained if powerful organizational leaders can suppress the expression of competing interpretations. On the other hand, organizations are precarious because coincident meanings are also regularly destroyed through action-taking. Destruction of meaning has its origin in fundamental contradictions, which, if raised, create the potential for individual and organizational transformation.

Politics and Strategic Change Across Organizational Life Cycles

This paper links research on political processes in organizations with research on organizational life cycles and strategic change. It is proposed that politics accompany strategic changes but are manifested differently at each stage of an organizations life cycle. A political life cycle model is developed in which contextual factors and strategic choices work together to evoke different political tactics during each period of the life cycle. The implications of this model for practicing managers and for research are addressed.